Member: akshara

About meWe are Deepa and Shrikanth, and our boys are Dyuman and Gautama. Deepa teaches college (Cultural Anthropology) and Shrikanth is a biochemist & cancer researcher. Dyuman just started second grade; Gautama is still our baby, no matter how old he gets! (updated: October 2008)

About my libraryWe have always enjoyed reading and surrounding ourselves with books. When there's nobody else around, or even when everyone's there, they make for some mighty fine company. Our library for children began really with Dyuman's birth, when we wondered what we would do with the growing collection of picture books once he was grown (we hadn't planned on a Gautama at that point). We then thought up the idea of a community library dedicated to children in Pondicherry, India, which is one of our favorite places in the world. There are few such in India, and it's a crying shame (& irony) that all the wonderful stories about Indian myth, legend, and folklore are more widely available in the United States than in India. We started calling our imagined library "Akshara," which is the Sanskrit word for syllable and alphabet, the originary sound, the foundation or seed of all existence. At the moment Akshara's collection is housed with us -- in our many bookshelves, in piles on the floor, and wherever else we can stash books. Once Deepa gets a spare moment to consider incorporating Akshara, she'll build it a website, start some fundraising or grant-writing, and start looking for a proper home for Akshara in Pondicherry. We hope Akshara's collection will eventually expand to French (since it's a language widely spoken in Pondy) and Tamil, which is the local language. Big Dreams! In the meantime, we continue to collect books on our own & from friends, read them all avidly over and over and over. The list we've uploaded into the catalog represents only a small fraction of what we have...